1. Field
The field of the invention is devices for winding strips of material into rolls for storage or transportation.
2. State of the Art
A relatively recent development in floor covering embraces the use of a base strip of carpet material secured to the bottom of a wall in place of the more traditional base board adjacent the carpet on the floor. Strips of carpet are cut from larger pieces, and the upper edges subsequently covered by narrow fabric strips or the like commonly referred to as binding tape sewn thereover. Generally the carpet strips, which are usually either four inches, six inches, or eight inches in width, are cut from full rolls of carpet to form strips between fifty and one-hundred-fifty feet in length. The carpet is unrolled in order to cut the strips. The strips must then be either packed to move to a sewing machine for application of the binding tape, after which they again must be packed for transportation to the job site. Sometimes the binding tape is applied at the site where the carpet is cut to avoid one packing step. In many cases the carpet strips are rolled by hand into rolls. This procedure is time-consuming and awkward. However, if the strips are not rolled, the strips tend to become jumbled and tangled, particularly if forcibly jammed into bags or boxes for transport to sewing or job sites. The subsequent untangling of the strips is time consuming and expensive, and undesirable folds and wrinkles may have developed. The sewn-in-place binding tape covers of the upper edges of the base strips to conceal severed fibers and pile and prevent unraveling of such fibers and piles. The strips must be passed through a sewing machine to fold and attach this binding tape in place. After this, the lengths of carpet stripping must still be transported to distant job sites so that tangling and the like can still occur. This double handling of the carpet base strip where the carpet may be manually rolled up twice is, of course, expensive and time-consuming.
While various machines are available for rolling strip material or other elongate items, such as, for example, flattened fire hose, none is capable of easily rolling carpet base strips.